What does it mean to do something "like a girl"?

"You run like a girl."

If someone told you that you did something "like a girl", how would you feel? Offended? Insulted? How has "like a girl" come to mean inferior, weak, and not as good as how a man would do it?

Always (yes, the maker of sanitary pads)wants to change that. They made a kind of sad, kind of heart-warming, video that asked a bunch of adults to run, throw, hit a ball, "like a girl". All of the adults immediately performed the tasks in a very particular way: arms flailing, hands delicately held up, weak, and scared. Then they asked some young girls to do the same.

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Always then asked the participants to really think about what it means to do something "like a girl", and the impact the phrase could have on young girls. This is where it gets kind of sad. A little boy says that saying "like a girl" is insulting girls, but he didn't mean to insult his sister. A young girl says "like a girl" "sounds like a bad thing", even though she doesn't really understand what it means. The video asks what saying "like a girl" will do to a girl when she's going through puberty, a time when her self-confidence plummets.

"In my work as a documentarian," says the film-maker and director of the video, Lauren Greenfield, "I have witnessed the confidence crisis among girls and the negative impact of stereotypes first-hand. When the words 'like a girl' are used to mean something bad, it is profoundly disempowering."

Always now wants us to redefine and reclaim "like a girl" to mean something positive. "Yes, I kick like a girl, and I swim like a girl, and I walk like a girl, and I wake up in the morning like a girl," says one woman, "because I AM a girl, and that is not something that I should be ashamed of."

What does "like a girl" mean to you? Leave a comment below or tweet us @CosmopolitanUK to let us know your thoughts!

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